HOVERAir X1 | Outdoors Gadget of the Year 2023?

I'm loving this I'm loving this already so you may have noticed quite a few hover a X1 videos on YouTube of late and and I'd noticed that as well and I've watched quite a few of them myself and I was really intrigued by this product um it's described as a self-flying camera bit like a drone I suppose uh and so I got in touch with hover air uh told them that I was very interested uh in the product and asked if I could test one out so they very kindly uh sent me one of the devices and we're going to take a first look at it I'm going to give you my first impressions and we're going to have a play so when you get the hover air X1 you take it out of the box and it comes in this soft little drawring bag it doesn't come with a case it comes with this bag um can just buy it on its own like that with the One battery or there is a combo combination package uh which you can get where you get the the dock and you can get the EXT extra battery um included now the first thing that I notice is the weight that is extremely light extremely light I think it's about 125 G I'll confirm that on the screen but compared to the other drone that I own which is the uh quite old now DJI mavic mini that is half the weight half the weight of my mavic mini um when I first looked at it in the other videos I thought it looked a bit flimsy but actually it's surprisingly sturd and as you can see it just opens up and just that will sit in my hand like that so it's so transportable that's the first thing I noticed is how transportable um it is now you might be thinking where's the rest of it where's the controller if you don't know it does not have a controller so that is the kind of the unique selling point I guess of this device is that unlike uh other drones out there like a DJI mavic mini you do not have have to plug it into a controller um there is none of that involved at all so this is completely self-sufficient it will actually fly on its own without a controller that's because on the top of the device just here there are five different flying modes that have been preset into the device um so it literally is a case of press a button and go I'm going to try it out for real in a moment and that is really attractive to me as an outdoor vlogger because with my DJI mavic mini there is so much faf involved you have to calibrate it because it relies on GPS you're calibrating compasses you have to um reset gimbals you've got to plug it into uh a controller which you also have to charge um there was so much setup involved that it has just become a device that I never really use when I'm doing outdoor vlogging because I just don't have the time uh or the energy or or the willpower just simply do that the other unique thing about this device is that you literally let it take off and land on the palm of your hand which sounds very very useful to me and we're going to try that out in just a second now I mentioned that you don't need an independent controller to fly uh the hover air X1 but it does have a very very useful app you don't have to have the app to fly it but the app is very very useful kind of things that you can do in the app is you can adjust the flight parameters you can get a little bit of a preview of what your camera can see you can play back in low resolution video that you have taken you can also sync sound recordings to the video that the X1 is producing and I'll come back to that in a bit this is the bit I'm very excited about I'm actually going to try this out and I'm not joking this is the first time I have flown this I've not had a practice so what you're seeing now is the first time that this particular X1 has ever had a flight and it's my first ever reaction to it so apparently it's very straightforward to Launch I literally just press that large power button uh and then the small black button to select my mode my flight mode and then the power button again and it should in theory take off so the first one that we're going to have a go at is hover which is the first one there so it should just leave my hand and hover in front of me so now we're going to try the next one zoom out which is zoom out 10 ft zoom out and that's zoomed out it says 10 ft and it's now coming back to where it was put my hand underneath simple I'm loving this I'm loving this already just the way it just detects where I am really accurately and just pops back it's such a time saer so if I was hiking I needed to get a few quick shots in that would save me so much time brilliant the next one which is the one that I've been really impressed with and what I've seen online it is this one third one which is follow okay that's just kind of getting into position and I think it's just turning around there it is and if I move off this way you should be seeing it follow me should we just check well hello there we are it is following me right I'm going to pick up the pace a little bit I'm going to move around now I quite like it that it's um quite noisy cuz I can actually detect that it's behind me still now it's saying that the battery is about to run out to give me a little message um so I've got my second one I'm going to put on there in just a minute so it's probably an opportune moment for me to talk about batteries um I can tell you from doing a lot of outdoor vlogging setting up shots and so on you don't really have to do that I think the reason I've I've whis through this battery today is simply because I'm doing a lot of practice and showing you how it works uh in reality they say you can get about 20 flights from One battery because you're pressing a button letting it go up um I'd probably only have it for a few seconds and then I'd land it again so in reality the battery lasts long longer than you think it's going to [Music] orbit it goes gets into position here we are it's going all the way around nice little 360 it should come back exactly to where it was should be tracking me coming back protecting my hand just so simple and so reliable which um again is very very appealing for me if I was out on a long-distance hike uh if these tests are anything to go by again I could go into the app I could change the flight parameters uh of that orbit the angle that it's going to kind of um Circle me the distance and so on okay we going to go with the fourth flight mode now which is the bird's eye view 16 ft bird eye we go now it is a bit Breezy today so I think it's struggling a little bit with that one I'm going to give it another go yeah it's going up a bit higher now now the wind is calm down it is actually going up to the distance it should not great in windy conditions it's working perfectly now should go green y there we go so the last setting that we got is a custom setting which you can adjust in the app and you can set that up as a dolly track which I'm going to try in a second you can do snapshots so still photos uh from the air uh you can also manually control the device as well so I'm going to try out the dolly track and we'll see what it looks like custom Dolly track continue Dolly track so what it's going to do now it's going to hover in front of me it's going to detect me and hopefully as I move towards it yeah it's going to back off and it's just going to continue filming me so you should be getting that wherever I go if I come over here it's going to keep tracking the if I walk towards it kind to pick up the speed a little bit you kind of get the idea finally what I'm going to try out is sound recording uh so I've got an external microphone uh plugged into my phone which is running the app and the idea is I switch on audio on the app all being well the X1 will do the video bit the app will do the sound and then the two will synchronize fingers crossed you'll be hearing something of what I'm saying hopefully testing one two three hello hello hello hello about to go coming back to me so I've had a quick preview of some of the footage and what you can do is within the app the hover air app on your phone um you can get a little bit of a quick kind of low resolution idea of what it looks like I did try downloading one one of them to my phone uh over 4G and it was pretty quick actually uh and I've watched it back and it's pretty smooth and one thing this device seems to have is uh really good stabilization um so it is pretty smooth and I noticed that today even when we had a little bit of a breeze couple of gusts come in um it wasn't massively noticeable and it seemed to be quite good the X1 at kind of stabilizing itself and writing itself in those conditions so final thoughts my conclusions I would say um this I mean some people have describe this as a bit of a game changer and I would I would agree with them um I would I would even go as far to say that as an outdoors vlogger this is pretty much the gadget of the Year for me I have for a very long time been using the DJI mavic mini as mentioned earlier in the video I found it completely faffy uh there's so much setting up there's so much adjusting and um sorting out of issues and problems this might sound a little bit over the top but I absolutely feel like this is perfect for vloggers outdoor vloggers and particularly uh people like myself who like to film um hiking videos um who just want to kind of give an extra perspective um to the videos 100% this is perfect for what I need I will be using it um in future videos I will be using it uh for longdistance hikes so you can obviously tell that I really like this device I genuinely I'm really impressed by the product and I can immediately see application for me and what I do um and there's not often that you can say that so I really would recommend this um product do I have any niggles any cons um the only thing that is a slight niggle slight concern is storage of footage you can't actually put an SD card into the device itself it's internal storage it says it comes with 32 GB but in reality it's about 24 because 8 GB is for the firmware on the device so I don't know maybe if you're doing kind of you know short little flights maybe it'll be okay I'm just thinking if I'm doing like a week or a two we multi-day hike I'm going to have to be careful of that and just make sure that I download footage um just to clear um the X1 camera so I don't get myself into a situation where I run out of storage space resolution wise you can film up to 2.7k I always film in 4k I don't think it's going to make a a major difference the reason I think they've done that is to save storage space and to ensure battery longevity is not massively impacted maybe in a in a in a future follow-up model they might introduce 4K but I think I can deal with that for the moment I don't think unless you're really looking for it you're going to massively Spot the Difference so I'm going to wrap it up there uh if you have got a comment about this product maybe you own it maybe you're thinking of getting one please do get in the comments and let me know what you are thinking there is going to be a link in the video description to this product so click on that if you need more information take care of yourselves and I'll see you soon

Channel: Ben’s Hikes & Camps

Views: 2,146

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Id: eMv05SO_kuw

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023